Fantasy and identification in empathy.

David Beres, M.D. and Jacob A. Arlow, M.D. It is easy to cloathe Imaginary Beings with our own Thoughts & Feelings; but to send ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves in to the Thoughts & Feelings of Beings in circumstances wholly & strangely different from our own ... and who has achieved it? Perhaps only Shakespere ... a great Poet must be implicitè if not explicitè, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact/for all sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening to the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child. —SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE (1802)